The Forging of a Dark Crystal Poster
The Dark Crystal - Guy Stauber
Commissioned exclusively for Layered Butter.
When Layered Butter asked me to pick a blockbuster film to illustrate, I set myself a challenge...
My movie licensing work almost never includes fantasy, and I felt like it would stretch me to pick a firm favourite from my youth ’The Dark Crystal’.
I start by identifying a scene or narrative from the film that I really like, and that perhaps isn’t the obvious choice.
If you concentrate only on the most iconic components I think it becomes difficult to stand out.
I then break down the assets I want to include in the piece, after some research I knew I wanted the Landstriders, the castle, some landscape elements and the Mystic 'sand painting’. I often like to include a hidden feature which isn’t obvious at first glance, manifesting here as a Skeksis head in the clouds with the middle sun as the eye.
I start putting these ideas together from source files I’ve collected, first in a very rough Photoshop collage, then I start to play chess with the individual elements and move on to illustrating the ones which I feel are working.
I don’t do a traditional ’sketch’ when left to my own devices, I just keep refining each element and changing the composition and colour scheme until something ‘pops’ and it starts to look right. At the end of each day I send myself a WIP version which I study on my phone and make notes about in the evening, so by the next day I’m ready to go.
Ultimately I end up with a massive Illustrator file that crashes my Mac at every opportunity!
Huge thanks to Layered Butter for asking me to contribute, it’s a great honour to be involved…
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